Day: December 18, 2011

I’m bestowing upon myself the rank of WordPress Blackbelt. A couple years ago, I wrote a post about how to copy your WordPress installation from your internet server to your localhost server. I was new to WordPress and had trouble with the simplest things. A lot of people have posts and help on the internet, but when you’re new web development and you’re stuck on something – and I mean really stuck, and there’s no one to turn to, you have two choices: you can give up or you can persevere. I keep choosing to persevere and I’m glad. It has made me so much stronger and has given me so much confidence.

Two years later, I still have a lot to learn. But, I have the basics down and I can survive in this jungle they call the internet. I fear no hacker. Two years ago, when someone said HTML, I said gesundheit. Today I can tell you how to launch a WordPress site with secure table prefixing, protect your wp-config file with htaccess, firewall your site from malicious hackers, sniff out base64 injection hacks and find the IP address of the motherfucker who tried to jack you and block his ass. I can tell you how to block proxy access from malbots that come to steal my shit and put them on the blacklist until they come back on their knees with an apology. I feel like finally I can survive in this jungle of web development.

Even if you can get through my black belt defenses, I can re-spawn in under a half hour like a I didn’t miss a beat. I can’t tell you what confidence that gives me. It makes me feel so good to be writing this post [that no one will ever probably read]. It makes me feel like I can put some teeth behind my testament to a future client that your code is safe with me.

I got into this web development thing with one site in mind: respectmyplanet.org. For two years, I’ve struggled to learn the most basic foundations of knowledge in PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Apache Server / htaccess, Javascript, and WordPress. I’ve been hacked via my ftp connection because someone hacked Comcast and sniffed out my ftp username and password. I’ve been PHP injected into my own weak PHP code because of my weak SQL $_POST sanitzation skills. I’ve had my WordPress installation compromised because I didn’t know how to lock down my wp-config and wp-admin/installation.php pages. Each time I was proverbially knocked to the ground with no hand reaching down to me to help me back up. But, I got back up. I got back up a little stronger than I was before.